Making the choice to book a beach villa in Bali is an exciting and thrilling thought. However, you should always approach holiday bookings with caution, especially when they are made on the other side of the world. Most people are familiar with reports which say that Bali is one of the world’s most beautiful islands, but your holiday may turn sour if you arrive at your accommodation to discover that it is not what you were hoping for.

Here are some tips help you to ensure that you book one of the best villas for your holiday abroad.

Check for reviews of on trusted review sites like Tripadvisor. This is a good way to find out more about the experiences of people who have already visited a hotel or villa complex. It is also a good way to check whether the information which you read on the accommodation’s website is accurate. People are not afraid to vent their dissatisfaction on review sites, so they can help you to “know before you go”.

See if the hotels which you are considering have won any major tourism awards. The awards which are handed out by Hospitality Asia are highly sought after, and any hotel which has been given an award like this will be proud to display such a badge on their website. High-profile awards show that the standards of customer care and the state of the accommodation are well above average.

Bali can get very hot at any time of year, and if you book a property without air-conditioning, you could find yourself in a very uncomfortable position. If you spot a deal on a property which looks too good to be true, it is always best to check whether the property has functional air-conditioning before you book it, because many discount properties do not have a proper cooling system.

The perfect location can depend on your needs. Some people would prefer their accommodation to be in a quiet neighbourhood, whilst others would prefer to be within walking distance of more activities. Find this information out before you book.

If you are booking online, consider booking directly through the accommodation provider. Some providers can offer you a great deal if you are able to book online in advance.

Binding of covers should be carefully planned and well managed to achieve the best possible results. We have a wealth of experience in this area so we’ve put together the following guidelines to help you prepare your print job prior to finishing.

Grain Direction

When preparing your job, please note that the direction of the cover grain is critical. For a better quality finish, please ensure the grain runs from head to tail rather than across the page. A failure to do this may lead to the cover cracking when creased and the job being sub-standard.

Binding

If you are going to be binding your publication with screws, then we highly recommend getting some good quality nickel plated ones for the best finish possible.

UV Varnishing

When using varnish, avoid all areas which are going to be creased or that wrap around spines. The varnish will peel off of these areas and will spoil the end product.

Inside Cover

Printing inside the cover is OK but please avoid printing on the spine and hinge areas as the print or the seal does not always adhere to the glue and can pull away.

Positioning

When covers are printed, we recommend that gutters are left between the heads and tails. If there is a 6mm trim on the head of the text, try to leave 12mm in the covers so that there is adequate room for the trim.

Line Ups

If a book has a line up between the front cover and the first page of text, consider that the most common hinge is 6-7mm so any images on the inside of the text and cover will be lost. Line ups for the rest of the book are OK but be aware that glue can push up between the sections, especially on thread sewn books.

Thread Sewn

If a book is to be thread sewn, it must be carefully planned. We recommend that you sew jobs as 16pp or 24pp sections depending on the paper weight. If a book is A4 and you can only print SRA2 then the 8pp sections can be printed to insert to 16pp or 24pp sections. If there is a 4pp section this should wrap around the outside of another section.

Each printed spread should be supplied separately so that it can be folded individually (not as a booklet) Regardless of size, each section should consist of no more than a 16pp section. You will need to supply a reasonable number of ‘overs’ due to the number of processes that have to be carried out

Note: 4pp sections cannot be sewn as single sections as they tear and jam the sewing machines.

I used to run a website selling digital memory and it did very well for many years. During my time running it I learned a lot and I also made a lot of mistakes. Here is some of the marketing story…

Once you have a loyal customer following you can then start to dictate your prices putting them up a percent of two. Keep up the same quality and service and they’ll stand by you. The great thing for us was that everyone else in our market were already stupidly expensive so it was easy to undercut.

You may be thinking at this stage (it’s all a bit easy to just undercut and expect to do well in business) yes, this is partially true, anyone with half a brain can undercut a competitor. It’s a no-brainer as they say and well…many do this without backing it up with the quality and service the consumer deserves.

These are the parts they decide to miss out on. When all a business owner can think of to beat his or her competition is to go in lower it’s just not going to work on its own. You still need to be clever offering something they’re not offering.

In our case the best quality and service came through. I wanted not only to be the best digital memory provider online but also offer the customer a seamless experience when purchasing, this is when we hired a web design agency to design our store with the buyer needs completely in mind at all times. I started to get engrossed by our customers often to a addicted state of mind. Wanting to know exactly when, why and how they arrived at the store and what they where interested in purchasing.

This all happened when I purchased Who’s On I love this software! – I loved the real time keyword referrer results knowing what a consumer was searching for (what keyword they had used) when they hit our website. This was very powerful stuff, If we didn’t have the product they were looking for, I would tell our purchaser to get it and of course this would end up in more sales for us. Simple but very effective!

I felt that once I knew all there was to know about our customers I could start improving the website so they would stay longer and obviously spend more but at the same time enjoy being on what I would still call today a very boring website. Not because of design but really the subject matter (digital memory). Not exactly stimulating, buying memory is boring for most.

Luckily I didn’t get too involved in the purchasing as this would have bored me silly not to mention this was not my strong point. Another stat worth mentioning was that 44% of all visitors left the homepage after 30secs (bounce rate), just goes to show you how fast you must act and use your homepage to sell or deliver to the visitor exactly it was they were searching for. These stats are approximate because who can trust the accuracy of AwStats and Google Analytics.

Still, non-the-less, this was valuable information we needed to know.

Using these simple strategies we built up a great name quickly and I started to feel the brand awareness building fast. Forum marketing happened on its own. People started to talk about how excellent our phone staff were and then how great the prices and service was. Even freebies we’d give away and the competitions we’d run, little things like this are very powerful marketing tool for any business.

I haven’t mentioned PPC yet and I will go into it in detail in another separate article. What I will say is that It didn’t work for us at first and took a great deal of testing to find the correct keywords, but once you have done this it should pay off. In our market it was not very profitable and ROI was very little but we didn’t care because we wanted the customer not the profit. As long as we broke even we were happy. The value is in your customer you must remember this at all times.